Well, it’s a question that’s been asked many times before. It’s probably one that Alexis bemusedly wonders every time he puts up new purely self-destructive content and watches a dedicated core of players trip over themselves to impale themselves upon it. It’s not a weak question. Seeking Mr Eaten’s Name is an arduously long quest that invites plenty of danger, requires heavy losses, and rewards nothing more than the player’s continued self-destruction. What exactly about this is so enticing?
So I figured I would make a thread. Seekers - why are you Seekers?
If multiple options on the poll above suit you, just pick the one that goes best. But even the best poll can only cover so much. What personally drove you to your damnation? In-character reasons? Personal reasons? Do you have a twisted sense of fun? Do you really like wells? Was it because all the cool kids were doing it?
For me, personally, there are a few reasons. Seeking the Name was the attention hook that got me to check out Fallen London to begin with, although that was hardly my introducer’s intent. Forbidden quests, madness, ominous names. Sure, why not? I waited a bit to build myself up before plunging into the well, eagerly sampling all the lore I could in the meantime. This, of course, only whetted my appetite.
Now that I know the story – well, it’s probably misguided as all hell, but I feel sorry for Mr Eaten. No matter how monstrous he’s become, the fact remains that he got screwed over, hard. What happened to him is not fully understood, but it was not quick, not painless, degrading, and in the end, failed to even put him out of his misery. I have to wonder what he was like, back when he was a Master under a certain Name. There’s no way to restore him, but if I can become the tool of his vengeance, I will do what I must.
The quest itself is wonderfully, wonderfully written. I dig through new text eagerly. Hungrily, perhaps. And there are plenty of times where I’ll do something, and then just stop and stare at the result text for a good minute or five, letting the gravitas of what I just did sink in. I’m only freshly Scarred, Stained, and Chained, but there were many points along that undertaking where I truly and viscerally felt for my character. That’s the gist of it, really – it makes me feel. Satisfaction and sadness are easy enough to stir in a reader, but… well, at risk of reusing a word so soon, Seeking the Name evokes things a lot more visceral. For me, it was a mix of horror, shock, excitement, and pity, all condensed into an incomprehensible ball of ‘whoa’.
I also love the idea of what Seeking does to the mind. It’s sort of like a disease – it starts off small, innocuous. An idea, a niggling thought. But the more you humor your obsession, the more it consumes you – twisting you from a curious citizen dabbling in forbidden knowledge to a hallucinating, ravenous, self-destructive shell of a person. You are consumed by your hunger, just as he was consumed – but not solely in the visceral way that Seekers tend to eat everything they can get their mouths on. The quest itself is a seething hunger for knowledge – one that grows more and more frantic and irrational as it progresses. A Seeker’s insatiable need for sustenance is but a reflection of that.
So, yeah. In the end, there was no way I couldn’t take part in this. It hit me right in the interest. Plus, I have this lovely feeling of belonging. Like I’m in some sort of exclusive clique. An exclusive clique full of frothing madmen, but exclusive nonetheless.
My in-character reasons are a bit different. I am more or less lazily roleplaying an existing character, Alex Mercer, who in a nutshell is an inhuman and ridiculously powerful creature pretending to be human, and failing in some respects. He is kind of a dick and hates, above all else, being controlled. A la my headcanon, he took exception to one of the Masters over a perceived threat and tried to attack him, something which resulted in Mr Hearts driving him out of his mind with a particularly potent Correspondence sigil and walking off, tutting disapprovingly. Alex never really got over this, and he started Seeking on rumors of a dead Master, on hopes that he might discover just how they could be killed. But Seeking warps the mind, and inevitably the whys always take a backseat to the search itself. And when he learned more of what happened to Mr Eaten, it became a lot more personal, because many facets of what happened to Mr Eaten resonated with his own experiences – hunger, betrayal, losing everything that you were.
So… that’s my seven cents. What drives you all to Seek?
edited by Laluzi on 12/5/2013